


as the friendship goes, resentment grows

by AndreaLyn



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:01:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28409652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: It's been a strange few days for Nile. First, she discovers she can't die, then Andy and Booker kidnap her to try and keep her hidden away from Joe and Nicky, who abandoned their goodwill towards humanity when they were captured in World War I. Nile's the one who decides that it's time to try and break the cycle, seeking to bring Joe and Nicky back into the fold, despite Andy and Booker's failure to do so, many times.It's just a matter of getting through to the two men, who've decided that the only thing they care about is protecting one another.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 37
Kudos: 212
Collections: The Old Guard Mini Bang 2020





	1. wake up

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Raine Wynd for the beta! Huge thanks to [faalthien](https://faalthien.tumblr.com/) for the art, which is both embedded within the story, but can also be viewed in its own post!

Nile was calling it -- this was the _worst_ day she’d ever had. 

She woke up in a body bag in a makeshift morgue with no scratch on her throat despite the fact that she _knew_ a knife had slashed it open. Her team had looked at her like she was something unnatural or worse -- that Nile had somehow betrayed them by living. Then, she’d been given orders to report to her commanding officers for a new assignment. It had sent a chill down her spine, especially since they wouldn’t answer her questions or even look her in the eye when she’d asked for clarification. 

Something strange was going on and she wasn’t born yesterday (though, she had the worst feeling that did _die_ then). 

Nile wasn’t ready to report to them; she wasn’t ready to face whatever was happening. 

She did what she always did when confronted with something that was too big for her body. Nile put her earphones in and drifted away to music. The fast pace of the last few days finally slowed as she closed her eyes and tried to find solace in the absence of answers, to the beat of her favorite songs.

“...Freeman.”

Nile opened her eyes to see two officers approaching her, hearing them call her name in the lulls between lyrics.

In the wake of everything that she couldn’t explain (her neck without a scar, those dreams, how her team could look at her like that), the chain of command was still something to be respected and followed. Even if she couldn’t shake the worry that she’d done something wrong, it felt strangely like a relief to anticipate a set of orders. 

They’d come to her instead of letting her go to them. Was it really that urgent?

She pulled her earbuds out, not in the mood to get in trouble with her superior officers when her squad was already treating her like a complete outsider. She felt her spine straightening, sitting a little taller, and she eyed them both warily. 

“You were meant to come get your new orders. You’ve been transferred to Germany. Landstuhl.”

Germany? That didn’t make any sense.

“Sir, I don’t understand. Why do I have to leave?” Nile frowned, because something about this wasn’t right. 

“We weren’t given too many details,” he said, “The brass wants further testing on your … condition, that’s all we know. Wheels up in thirty.” Before Nile could ask for further explanations, the lieutenant crumpled on the ground in front of her, followed swiftly by the corporal. She scrabbled to move backwards, heels digging into the ground and propelling her back against the stucco wall, gaping at a pair of civilians who _just took out her commanding officers_.

Standing in their place was a woman with dark hair and sunglasses, looking bored even as she buffed her knuckles on her khakis. Beside her stood a tall, broad-shouldered man in a denim jacket that looked _really_ out of place in a war zone, and that was saying nothing about the smell of booze that seemed to waft off both of them. 

“What the...fuck?” Nile spat out. 

“Nile Freeman?” 

She nodded instead of asking what the _fuck_ they thought they were doing -- force of habit. She knew she probably shouldn’t be giving these people her name, especially not when they’d just taken out two of her commanding officers. 

So why did she feel so relieved? Why was she grateful that she wasn’t about to get pulled onto a plane and sent to Germany to become a lab rat? Even if she was freaked out and unsure, the military was the enemy she knew.

These two were strangers and Nile had no idea what they wanted, how they knew her, or why they were here. The thing was, the woman looked kind of familiar, like Nile had seen her before. What got Nile to trust them, if only a little, was that they looked unnerved and unsure, glancing over their shoulders like they were anticipating fire.

Whatever Nile was getting herself mixed up in, at least it wasn’t with a couple of complete psychopaths.

“Who _are_ you people?” Nile demanded, splitting her attention between the woman and the guy lurking behind her. 

She understood why she was freaking out. She still couldn’t explain how she didn’t have a scar on her throat and her girls had banished her like they’d never even been a team. Nile had plenty of reasons to look frantic and scared. These two? Nile didn’t know the first thing about why they were acting like they were under fire.

“I’m Andromache, the Scythian,” the woman said, nodding to the man over her shoulder. “This is Booker.” 

She’d seen them before. Nile squinted at them and realized, “You’re in my dreams with the others.”

“That means they know where she is,” Booker said heavily.

“Who’s they?” Nile demanded. “Who are you people?” 

“We’ll explain later.” 

NIle opened her mouth to demand why “later” but the butt end of a rifle knocked her onto the ground, her consciousness dotting out. The last thing she saw was these two assholes looming over her, revising Nile’s opinion about whether they were psychopaths. 

It didn’t matter.

Nile would make sure she got out, somehow, some...

* * *

She woke up in a moving vehicle.

“We don’t know they want her,” the man was saying. “The last report we had of them, they were working on an oil rig out in the middle of the ocean.”

“They’re still looking for Quynh,” the woman retorted. “They’ll want to approach the new one and get more information from her dreams.”

“If they’re looking, they’re not finding. Same as us and the team we have out there. What makes you think they’ll beat us to her?”

“Because I’ve always had shitty luck,” the woman said darkly.

The man snorted. “I’d toast to that, if I had a drink. Oh. Wait.” Nile heard the sloshing of liquid, catching the glint off a flask as the man knocked it back. 

While they talked about _whoever_ ‘they’ were, Nile tried to get her bearings. She wasn’t tied up, but she still felt a little groggy, and knew she wouldn’t be able to hold her own in a two-on-one fight. Gripping one of the handles in the Jeep, Nile fought the urge to throw up as she sat up, dismissing the idea of escaping when one of them could easily come after her and the other could cut her off with the vehicle.

Better to get answers and plan an escape later.

“Who the hell are you people?” she demanded, head swimming from the knock she’d taken. She reached back to feel for the bump, but strangely, found nothing.

“We’re like you,” the woman said. “I’m Andy. This is Booker.” Nile remembered that from the introductions earlier. Her head was still ringing slightly, but she had enough sense to be able to see the glint of a dagger lying at Booker’s side. 

Suddenly, Nile had an escape plan. 

“You talked about another ‘they’,” she reminded them, not so much because she wanted the answer, but because she wanted them distracted. “Who do you mean?”

Andy glanced at Booker, not buying into the distraction so quickly. “We’ll explain it when we’re safe in Paris,” she suggested. “It’s nondescript, they haven’t been there in years. They wouldn’t recognize it.”

“Assuming they haven’t found out about it,” Booker reminded her. 

While they debated, Nile slipped her fingers over the dagger and clasped it, quietly unsheathing it as they bickered about personal effects left in this Paris safehouse. Seizing her opportunity, Nile grasped the hilt of the dagger and lunged, stabbing Andy in the shoulder and pinning her to the driver’s seat.

Maybe she should have thought this through better. The Jeep kept jerking around from its lack of steering, and without a seatbelt, Nile was basically a bouncy ball being knocked from side to side.

“Mother _fucker_!” Andy yelped, yanking the knife out and grabbing the steering wheel after the Jeep went careening off the road into the desert. Nile grappled for something to hold onto, banging her head on the side of the Jeep as they came to a full stop. Maybe she could get the keys and make a run for it, but when she leaned forward to make a snatch for the keys, she was stopped by the sight of the stab wound. 

The blood was clearly on Andy’s tank top, but the wound was healing.

There was no wound and it wasn’t like it was healed. It looked like there had never been a wound at all (just like the bump she should have had, just like the scars on her throat). 

“I’m gonna…” Nile gulped, feeling whatever meal she’d eaten last rising up within her. 

Booker glanced over his shoulder. “Boss?” he said calmly. “I think maybe we should pull over. You know I hate the smell of vomit.”

Andy was still cursing under her breath as she jammed her foot on the brake. “You get her out of here and show her,” she spat at him. Nile nearly went through the windshield at the sudden stop, only avoiding splintering the glass by bracing herself on the headrests.

Booker nodded, opening the door for her. “Come on,” he encouraged. 

Too overwhelmed to do anything else, she followed. Nile staggered out of the car, her mind still thinking of the way the knife had sliced through Andy’s shoulder into the seat, but how the skin and muscle had sewn up, undoing the damage Nile had created.

She didn’t fight it anymore. Nile collapsed to her knees and puked.

She’d just _stabbed_ a woman. By all rights, she ought to be relieved that it healed, but that wasn’t helping with Nile’s capacity to understand the situation. The man -- Booker, she remembered -- dug into his pocket and handed her a few crumpled tissues.

“Thanks,” she said warily, even though thanking her kidnapper for some shitty tissues felt like she’d fallen down the rabbit hole where they were trying to pass this shit off as normal. “ _What_ are you people?”

“Whatever we are, you’re the same,” Booker said with a rueful smile. “You can’t die. I could shoot you in the head, stab you, poison you with an obscene amount of alcohol if that weren’t such a waste, but I think you already know I’m right, deep down. Andy and I, we’re like you.” Nile collapsed back to the dusty ground, feeling the sun beating down on her, tasting the vomit on her tongue. This wasn’t a dream. 

This was real, no matter how hard it was to accept that.

“I died for the first time fighting with Napoleon,” he kept going. “Ever since, I won’t stay dead. I heal. I come back. Andy is the same.”

“Napoleon,” Nile murmured, gaping at him. “ _Shit_.” Her eyes flickered back to the Jeep where Andy was snacking on something like a Mom waiting to pick up her kids from soccer practice and not a woman in the middle of an abduction. “And how old is she?”

“Old,” Booker said.

“That’s not a good enough answer!” Nile snapped, because she was having a bad day and this vague _bullshit_ was almost more than she could handle. “How old is she?”

“When I find out, I’ll tell you,” Booker retorted. “Look. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but we’re trying to keep you safe. There are things about this that are hard to understand and even harder to process, but that woman? She will keep you safe. Right now, even though you don’t know it, we’re your best bet.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“We’re in the open, right?” Booker pointed out, gesturing to the desert around them. “You dreamed of us. We dreamed of you. We saw the desert, your nametag, and we figured it out. The people we’re trying to hide you from are going to figure that out too. We’re moving you. It’ll be temporary, but we’ll explain there.”

Nile stared at him, unable to shake her suspicions. 

Then again, he wasn’t wrong. The desert was expansive and cruel out here and Nile was taking her chances if she attempted escape. She might find her way back to base, but what then? Transferred to Germany for tests? That had an eerie ring to it that she wasn’t sure she liked. As much as it seemed insane, she was going to put her trust in these strangers.

“I’ll go with you. For now,” Nile agreed, wanting to make sure it was a conditional acceptance. “If things get weird,” weirder than they already were, at least, “I’m running.”

“I get it,” Booker said with a heavy sigh. “I should’ve done the same.” He held his hand out to her. 

This was probably the biggest mistake she was ever going to make, but Nile reached out and took it. Better the devil she (sort of) knew at this point. If she really couldn’t die, that meant that she could start figuring out an escape plan, but for now, these two strangers were her tickets to safety.

“Boss,” Booker called over her shoulder. “Start it up.”

“Good, we have to get out of here. They’ll have figured out where she is by now.” 

Nile was still uneasy about this whole ‘people coming for her’ thing, but it seemed like between the people that Andy and Booker were running from and her own military, she wasn’t lacking enemies.

Were they enemies? She didn’t even know that.

Better that she stuck with the people that she mostly knew. It wasn’t a decision that Nile felt confident about, but given her seeming dearth of choices, she would count on Booker’s kindness and his seeming sincerity as a guiding light. 

The _minute_ they were safe, though, Nile was going to demand answers.

* * *

> _Police are searching for additional witnesses to a crime committed last night in Budapest. The sole eyewitness stated that two men wearing masks murdered and emasculated a man attempting to sexually assault her. If you have any information, please contact the local authorities._

The safehouse in Paris turned out to be a run-down parish outside the city, where the number of planes overhead clarified why no one wanted to come to this little spot of paradise anymore. Booker found her a change of clothes and Nile folded up the remnants of her life as a Marine to set beside the bed. The clothes were her exact size, which unnerved Nile slightly. Had they been planning for her? Or did they just get lucky?

She was fed, warm, and safe.

At least, she suspected she was safe. Andy and Booker didn’t have much more to tell her about the whole immortality thing. They’d demonstrated their healing abilities with burns, knives, and other random kitchen appliances, explaining that while they healed, they still hurt. Andy told her about the impermanence of it all, how it might vanish at any point.

“And the others?” she asked. “You said there were others.”

Booker and Andy exchanged a look that made Nile feel like she was a child whose parents were keeping secrets from her. Something hot and angry burned in her chest, rising up and making her feel like she was choking on it. She was used to not having the full picture, but usually she was given _something_. 

Unfortunately, Nile got the feeling that trying to torture the information out of the two of them wouldn’t do much at all. 

Time was probably her best weapon to try and wait them out.

“There are beds in the other room,” Booker said with a gesture, packing up a bag. “You should rest.”

“Where are you going?” Nile asked warily.

“We just want to be ready, in case we need to move quickly.”

That answer didn’t make her feel very safe, but Nile was exhausted. If she didn’t sleep, she suspected she’d end up passing out from exhaustion on the floor. Given that she was trying to project strength and prevent Andy and Booker from thinking of her as weak, that wasn’t the best option for her. 

“Get your sleep while you can,” Andy called to her, still bent over piles of maps and papers. Nile had no idea what she was looking for, but then, she also had no idea who these people were. “Trust me,” she advised. “We’re going to need to move soon. You’ll want to be rested. Dying from sleep deprivation is up there on the list of ways you don’t want to go.”

Nile scoffed, wondering how the hell she wound up in this insane situation. “And you know that?”

“Unfortunately,” Andy said flatly. “I stopped the list when I got to ten, it was starting to get depressing,” she said, staring at Nile and not blinking. “If it makes you feel better, I can make it an order.”

“Not a Marine anymore,” was her bitter response, bending down to grab her folded uniform. “I’ll sleep on my own, thanks.”

She ignored the hushed whispers between Andy and Booker, getting the bad feeling they were talking about her. She put her uniform down beside the bed, sitting down on the lumpy mattress and reaching for the flat pillow. She’d slept on worse, but right now, all she wanted was to go home. Nile hugged the pillow tight to her chest as she laid down, telling herself to be strong and not to cry.

She had to be a warrior. She had to keep a thick skin to survive. 

Even though Nile tried to stay awake, the exhaustion of the last few days caught up to her swiftly. At first, she fell into a deep sleeping state, drifting through nothingness, but that didn’t last for long. 

Soon, the dreams woke Nile.

Only, she didn’t think that it was a dream so much as a _nightmare_. She woke, screaming, feeling the water rushing into her lungs. She tasted saltwater on her lips, and when she wasn’t underwater, she was on top of it, sailing somewhere. The sea surrounded her. She was under it, atop it, consumed by it, sailing on it. 

Maybe she was even sailing in the same direction as they were going, towards Paris. She couldn’t tell, not when she was still choking on seawater, _drowning_ and dying again and again.

Startling awake, she reoriented herself in the safehouse, gripping at the blankets. Both Booker and Andy were staring at her like they weren’t surprised to see her distress. Just past them, their bags were packed. 

“You dreamt again,” Andy said flatly.

Breathe. She told herself to _breathe_. Closing her eyes, Nile inhaled raggedly, and it was pure oxygen and she was fine. She was alive. “You’re okay,” came Booker’s voice. “It was a nightmare. I get them too, I know what it’s like. Breathe,” he encouraged. “You’re not in the sea. Say it.”

“I’m not in the sea,” Nile croaked out. She coughed, expecting water to fall past her lips, but nothing came. Because she wasn’t in the sea. She was on dry land. Her fingers fluttered to her throat, and after a few more breaths, she opened her eyes to see Booker leaning over her. 

“Good,” he said, squeezing her shoulder and pushing off the bed, his knee creaking against the old mattress. “She’s fine, boss,” he reported to Andy.

“I’m really fucking not,” Nile muttered under her breath, but she doubted that was going to change anything. Instead, she focused on two things -- breathing and the packed bags. “We’re moving again?” she asked, still trying to figure out what was going on. 

“It’s not safe while you’re still dreaming of them.” Andy nodded, clearly expecting Nile to fall in line. “Let’s go.”

“No.”

Booker shook his head, digging out his flask. “Not the right answer,” he warned under his breath.

Nile didn’t care. She would stand her ground until she got some _answers_. She moved her hand from her throat to dig them in the rumpled sheets, as if she could lock herself in place. “I’m not going anywhere until you explain why we keep running? Is it because of the men I keep seeing in my dreams? The woman at the bottom of the sea?”

They exchanged a look like they were _still_ somehow debating giving Nile the runaround when it came to answers. How many times were they going to treat her like this need-to-know information wasn’t for Nile? She was tired of being dragged around, and she wasn’t going anywhere until they let her in on it.

Whatever determination they saw in her made them relent. 

“The woman is Quynh,” Andy said, her voice hollow and bleak. “Before you, Booker and I spent most of our time trying to get to her before they did.”

_They_ , which had to mean the other two men that she’d been dreaming of. She’d never managed a clear look at them, but they didn’t seem scary. The true source of Nile’s nightmare had been the ocean bearing down its pressure on a woman, not two men curled up around one another asleep on a boat as it sailed the ocean. Nile eyed Andy and Booker suspiciously, wondering what they weren’t telling her.

“Who are they?” Nile demanded.

“Nicky and Joe. They’re like us.”

Nile squinted at Andy, then glanced at Booker, seeing how they’re both avoiding meeting her eye. “You’re afraid of them,” she realized. “What happened to them? To Quynh?”

Booker and Andy exchanged a long unspoken look that has Nile wondering if they’d somehow developed their own secret, silent language. Finally, though, their detente came to an end.

“They lost Quynh during the witch trials, but we lost Joe and Nicky in 1917,” Booker said roughly. “We knew they were somewhere in France, but we couldn’t find them. It took us sixty years before we crossed paths again. By that point, little was left of the men I knew. They had been killed on the battlefield so many times. Starvation, mustard gas, bayonets, no man’s land, they kept dying. Someone noticed and took them captive. They were kept in a lab together, made to watch the other suffer. Endless, constant suffering, for decades on end. It stripped them of their belief that they should help humanity. Joe and Nicky have always had each other, since the Crusades. It’s a connection and a love that most people will never experience. For decades, it was used against them.”

Nile shivered at the thought of being a lab rat for sixty years, wondering if that would have been her future in Germany if not for her abduction. “They escaped?”

“They did. They’re mercenaries for hire,” Andy said sharply. “They want to make people suffer, and not always just the ones who deserve it. Six decades being tormented in that lab changed them, broke them, and they went from caring about doing good for the world to only caring about each other and making sure they stayed safe.”

Nile didn’t say it out loud, but there was something in her voice that made Nile wonder if Andy _sympathized_ with them.

“They want to beat us to Quynh, bring her on board, we think,” Booker admitted. “Our last meet-up ended with my head cut off and a knife in Andy’s heart because we had the audacity to kill Joe to try and get Nicky to listen,” he said with a rough chuckle.

“The only thing they care about anymore is each other,” Andy replied calmly. “Did we make a mistake going after Joe? We did. We thought it was a sound strategy. Nicky’s a talented sniper and we never would have made it close to him. That meant taking Joe out of the equation. Unfortunately, all it did was upset Nicky more.”

Booker shook his head. “It was a pretty firm job offer decline and probably not smart thinking on our part. Now that they know there’s another one like us, we think they’ll come to you, make you an offer to join them.”

Andy stared at Nile the whole time, trying to gauge her reaction.

“Those men were tortured,” Nile said, gaping at them. “They were hurt and made to suffer. They had to watch the person they love tormented, and you thought the best way to get through to them and have a conversation was to _kill_ one of them while the other watched?”

There was no response from either of them. Andy’s face remained impassive, so calm that it made something _burn_ in Nile. How could she sit back like this? How could she let that happen to them? Booker at least looked guilty, drinking deeply from his flask in what she was beginning to see was one hell of a deeply ingrained coping mechanism,

Nile scrubbed her palms over her face, wondering if it had really been so long for both of them that violence was the only solution they could come up with in dealing with Nicky and Joe.

“Are you telling me they’re evil? Irredeemable? Are they going to hurt me if they find me?”

“We don’t think so,” Booker said, but the uncertainty in his voice wasn’t settling Nile’s worries. “They’re just in it for themselves. After everything they went through, it doesn’t matter what jobs they take, so long as they’re protecting each other. If Nicky gets hurt by the Italian Mafia, Joe finds a job that lets them take them out. If a drug lord even nicks Joe’s skin, Nicky will root out their distribution. It also means they take hit jobs for money so they have enough of it to keep on the move. They don’t question who the target is, not anymore.”

“Before all this, Nicky and Joe, they would’ve been our compass,” Andy explained.

Nile watched them as she worked these revelations over in her mind, feeling like she was creeping up to some kind of understanding. Andy and Booker were trying to get them back. Badly and without thinking it through properly, but they wanted to bring them back into the fold. Whatever their immortality was meant for, they had abandoned all the benefits and all the good it could do to chase down two men.

“Why do you think they want me?”

“They’ve tried to recruit us to their side before we clarified that we’re not interested and we’d rather bring them back to us,” Andy said. “It’s an educated guess that they’ll come after you to try and expand their ranks.” 

They could try. Nile wasn’t on board with killing people just to make sure she saved her own ass. She’d be horrified if she ever got to that point. Still, it felt like there were grey areas to this situation that she couldn’t even imagine. She was only twenty-six herself. What would she be like, if she’d been tortured her whole life, forced to watch someone she loved suffer? For a brief, awful, horrifying moment, she imagined her mother hurting like that for a week, but she couldn’t force herself to imagine it for longer. 

It was horrifying to imagine what that sort of suffering did to a person.

“We told you what you wanted to hear, now we have to go,” Andy said, voice steady. “Move.”

“How are you planning to keep running from them?”

“The next place we take you, there won’t be any information they can follow.” She glanced up to Booker. “Kilo safehouse.”

“Got it,” Booker agreed, digging out his phone and handing Nile a bag. “There are enough clothes in there for a while. Guns and ammo, too,” he said with a nod towards it. Nile stared warily at the bag, not sure about picking it up. It felt like she would be aligning herself with these two if she did. 

Was that the right choice? Or should she be reaching out to Nicky and Joe, trying to understand what happened and if there was any reconciliation to be had?

It was the memory of having her throat slit open that made her decision for her. Andy and Booker had been careful about not hurting Nile like that and had made it clear that they were more concerned with keeping her safe than hurting her. They were at least somewhat known to her.

The other two weren’t.

“Let’s go,” Nile said, bending down to pick up the bag. 

She might not intend to stay with them forever, but a few more days couldn’t hurt.


	2. run and find

> _Today, twelve members of the Neapolitan Mafia family were found dead on the beach in Sorrento. Near their bodies, headshots of several young orphans were erected. The children died in a fire two months ago, and charges were alleged that the fault was at the hands of the Spoleto family running an insurance scam._

Kilo safehouse was also in France, but where Goussainville had planes to keep people away, Kilo had a constant rain that drenched Nile to her bones. The room she’d been given was nondescript in all ways. If there had ever been a personality to decorate these walls, it had been sucked dry, leaving mute colors and an absence of design. She was surrounded by grays and dark greens, not a single painting on the wall, not a book on a shelf, and nothing to indicate that this place had ever been lived in. Given that Andy had done a pass of the room before she’d let Nile in, she suspected that was on purpose.

If Joe or Nicky dreamed of her while she was here, there was no way that she’d be able to give anything up, even unintentionally.

It was so boring, so plain, so _empty_ that there was nothing to give. 

Once she settled her bags in the room, she collapsed on the bed, sagging into the heavy mattress (she was _not_ thinking about the last time they’d replaced these things). Staring at the ceiling, Nile folded her hands together in prayer. She wasn’t sure she knew what to even pray for, so instead she focused on the meditative state she let herself lapse into. It made her feel more connected with _something_. She didn’t really care what higher power was looking after her right now, so long as someone was.

Nile left the boring bedroom to join the others once she felt a little more in control of her emotions, interrupting a hushed conversation. 

“Did you see the news?” Booker asked, his gaze fixed on Andy. “They took out a pharmaceutical company in London with an explosion. The news was talking about at least two dozen special forces bodies inside, along with the CEO and the top doctor. Former CIA operative was killed in Surrey the same day. It was Copley, the one who organized…”

“Surabaya, I remember,” Andy said evenly. “Why do you think they took them out?”

“My guess? It was a lab,” Booker said with a shrug. “Maybe someone figured out what they were, tried to get their hands on them. We know how well that turns out.” 

Nile kept her head down, trying to ignore the conversation as she headed to the kitchen for a cup of tea, but there was a connection that she wasn’t sure they saw. “It was probably the two of you that helped make the connection.” Her remark was met with silence. She looked up, not sure why it was such a big jump. “Copley, you said he was CIA? He probably looked into your background before the mission. Maybe something jumped out. And if you two worked with Joe and Nicky before and they’re paranoid about getting captured, if someone went after them…”

“You think Copley sent Merrick Pharma after them?” Andy asked dubiously.

“Look, I don’t know these guys, but you’ve got a building that was blown up with a bunch of armed forces inside and one dead ex-CIA agent just outside that city with connections to you and possibly them,” Nile pointed out. “That’d be a hell of a coincidence if someone didn’t have something on you, that’s all I’m saying.”

Andy stared at her for a very long moment, then said, “Booker, look into it. See if we can get a lead on them.” 

“We’re going to try another job offer?”

Andy fixed her eyes on Nile, like she was coming up with a new strategy. 

“Maybe we’re thinking about this the wrong way,” Andy said, her attention remaining on Nile with a look that made her squirm. Not even her meanest commanding officer had a stare like Andy’s, which made her feel like she needed to go do _something_ just to earn her approval. “We keep running from them to keep Nile out of their hands.”

Nile cringed as she anticipated what was coming next.

“Maybe we should be using her as bait.”

There it was. 

“Do I get a say in this?”

Andy shocked her to hell by responding with, “Yes.” 

It unsettled Nile so much that she was gaping, speechless. She’d been expecting to have to fight for her autonomy, not have it handed to her so easily. Squinting at Andy, she tried to figure out her game. “And if I don’t want to?”

“Then Booker and I will go after them again, but they will keep coming for you. If you meet them, the dreams stop,” she said. “We’ll use you to lure them out, see what Copley had on us, and if it turns out that you don’t like the men you meet and you don’t want to help us bring them back around to our side, then you can leave and you’ll be safe.”

“Well,” Booker drawled, “as safe as you can get, but they won’t be dreaming of you anymore.”

Nile sort of understood. It removed the immediacy of the threat if they stopped the dreams, but they were taking a risk putting her out in the open.

It was one she was willing to take.

“What do you need me to do?” she asked.

Andy smiled, almost like she’d already known Nile’s answer. “Be good bait,” she quipped. “And pack a bag for England. Make sure when you fall asleep tonight, the bag and the information about where we’re going is nearby. Booker can find you a book of maps.”

Nile bit her tongue to comment that all her bags were still packed because they hadn’t given her much of a chance to breathe. It felt like every time they settled somewhere new, they were running again. If Joe and Nicky were fugitives trying to keep themselves hidden, then she had news for Andy and Booker, who were also living that life.

Nile thought it was probably safer not to say anything at all. She repacked her bag (which amounted to maybe five minutes of work) and waited until Booker got them tickets, false identification papers, and a way out of France, which took the better part of the evening and the next morning.

By sundown the next day, they were on their way out of yet another country.

“Sad to be leaving?” Nile asked when they were at the train station.

Booker snorted, giving her an amused look. “I may be French, but I don’t think of this place as home anymore. That safehouse could have been in any country.” He sorted through several passports with varying identities, all with the same photo. It gave Nile a hint as to how many times they did this. “All I feel is worry,” he said, voice low so Andy wouldn’t overhear. “Meeting them will stop the dreams, but what if you go with them?”

Was he worried about her? He barely knew her. 

Nile gave him a wary look, because on the one hand, it was kind of sweet. On the other: “You don’t even know me,” she said what was on her mind. “Why do you care?”

Booker shrugged, advancing in the security line with Nile. Their passports had the same last name so they could travel together. Nile suspected that was Andy’s idea so Nile wouldn’t take off running before the job was done.

“I may not know you, but you’re like us,” he said. “I lost two brothers already. I don’t want to lose anyone else, even if we did just meet.”

She was veering back to thinking it was sweet. Nile let Booker walk ahead of her, but she kept him in sight for the whole train ride, even when they sat in seats separated by a few rows in the carriage. She didn’t sleep at all (possibly because she feared dreaming and showing where they were) and was stressed by the time they arrived. 

Booker waited for Nile, grabbing her luggage before she even asked him to. Andy went to get a rental car. Without a single word, they were off with a mission in mind. They bundled into the rental car (which was too small, but the moment Nile opened her mouth to make a comment, that cutting glare of Andy’s was back).

Nile quietly sank into the back seat and said nothing, instead thinking about the last time she’d been in London -- a layover between tours. 

This time, she was here as bait. While she was being dangled, Booker had explained that she should search through Copley’s files to see if there was anything that needed to be cleaned up, or whether there was any evidence that she could use to try and better understand how Copley made his connections to them.

She definitely preferred the last time, when she and some of the other girls had played tourist for the day. No one was likely to get captured or killed when she was roaming London taking pictures with her phone. 

Andy made their exit for the road out of the city, and as she did, Booker leaned over the headrest to speak to her. “Ready to get out there?” Booker asked. Without meaning to, Nile suddenly realized that it had only been _days_ since they were last in this exact situation.

Only, that time, Nile had stabbed Andy through the shoulder and almost puked all over Booker. She didn’t feel much better about this trip, which said everything about how ready she was.

“No,” she scoffed, “but I am ready to stop dreaming about these guys and give you a chance at getting them back. That’s got to be good enough.” 

Booker gave a nod, twisting back to face the windshield again. He crumpled his denim jacket to use as a pillow, which was definitely going to wrinkle it. Nile felt a little like a child, riding in the back of the car, but she kept her head down and kept quiet. She went over the job in her head, went over the job with Andy and Booker (more than once), and then focused on telling herself that it would be fine.

Hopefully. If Joe and Nicky did take the bait, like they hoped, she had no idea how that played out. 

“We’re here,” Andy said, startling Nile out of her thoughts (she was reviewing what she was going to say if she met Joe and Nicky, for what felt like the tenth time). She parked the car around the side of the house, out of sight, and exited the car with Booker. 

Here happened to be a nice little house in the countryside. 

If it weren’t for all the police tape, Nile would’ve thought it was a perfectly quaint place to settle down. She stared up through the window, biding her time (...well, really like delaying what was about to happen next). She kept expecting someone to come out and greet her, or anyone to be here, but that was before Copley got murdered.

Nile stepped cautiously onto the gravel path, closing the car door behind her. It was eerily quiet as she started to walk towards the front door, stopped by Andy’s hand on her wrist.

“You know the plan?”

“Yes, Andy,” Nile parroted back to her.

They’d gone over it three times when they were driving here from Gatwick. She knew the plan. She could recite the plan. She might not be the number one fan of the plan, but she had it in her mind. “Good,” Andy said. “We’ll be…”

“Just over there, waiting for my signal, I got it. What happens if they don’t show up?”

This whole plan revolved around the idea that Joe and Nicky would either come back here to make her an offer or clean up their mess. 

“Wait thirty minutes. If they’re not here, we’ll come back tomorrow and try again. Our key objective right now is stopping all of you from dreaming about each other.” Nile wasn’t about to argue with that. She’d already seen one too many safehouses in her lifetime. If there was another on the horizon, she would scream.

She wasn’t able to go until she asked: “You’re sure about this?” she asked Andy. “You’re sure about what kind of men they still are?”

“I think I am.”

It was as good as Nile was going to get. She nodded and let Andy relinquish her arm, stepping towards the open door of Copley’s house. Strange. If the police were finished with their investigation, they would have locked it, right? She fought to ignore the shiver down her back, because that meant she probably wasn’t alone, but that didn’t change anything. In fact, it meant they hadn’t wasted their time coming here. She waited until she heard the car tires against gravel -- the sound of Andy and Booker moving out of sight to wait -- before proceeding.

Ducking past police tape, she made her way inside, trying not to spend too long looking at all the personal effects of a dead man. She crept upstairs, finding her way to a study.

Inside it, the first thing that caught her eye was the patch of blood on the carpet. 

It was too easy to imagine Copley’s body strewn here, with a sniper’s bullet through his head. Nile closed her eyes tightly and ignored it, stepping towards something she hadn’t expected to find.

There, looming impressively across the entire back of the room, were an array of bulletin boards filled to the brim with photos, documents, and proof of four immortals’ lives. 

Andy and Booker’s exploits were there, detailing how many lives they had saved and the good they had done over the years. It wasn’t only them, though. Even though the exploits grew sparser in recent days, there was plenty on Joe and Nicky, too. 

It was proof that once, they had a heart and a steady moral compass to follow. 

The board also showed Nile that there was a thread running through the historical exploits of the people who had kidnapped her. Put together with string, pictures, and texts, Nile stared at a whole history of _good_. She just wished there wasn’t a bloodstain on the ground that showed what happened when that good tipped over the edge and went too far in the other direction.

Nile lingered as long as she could. Last night, when she’d dreamed, she’d made sure that her bags were packed near her so they’d see the train ticket for London. Andy had guaranteed that they wouldn’t be far behind, which meant that they should be here by now. The open door was additional proof that they ought to be. 

Nile stepped towards a picture of Andy from the 19th century in full military uniform, her fingers brushing the edge of it when she felt the presence of someone else in the room with her. 

Right now, she wished she had a gun more than anything, but Andy had promised that she and Booker would be watching.

“Besides, you don’t die,” Andy had pointed out, midway through their second recounting of the plan.

“That won’t stop them drugging my ass and kidnapping me,” Nile had hissed in return.

“We’ll be there,” Booker had vowed.

That had been the end of the argument, which meant no gun for Nile. With someone else in the room with her, she actively wished she’d pushed harder. Nile forced herself to remain casual, hands in the pockets of her coat, pretending she hadn’t noticed the footfall on the carpeting. 

This was their first move. She wanted to know what kind of opening gambit they’d use. 

“So, you are Nile.”

Her posture went ramrod straight at the voice. The words were heavily accented -- Italian -- which meant it was Nicky. Nile turned to see a man wearing a dark hoodie standing in the doorway of the study. He wore sleek black trousers beneath the hoodie and combat boots, but what was truly strange was the _sword_ attached to the same belt as a long-range rifle. Behind him was another man, resting casually with his hip against the doorway. Nicky was all business, but Joe looked like he was casually hanging out. He had a hand on a gun that Nile could see past the flashy leather jacket. He was more casually dressed, in a pair of jeans and a baseball cap with the brim hiding his forehead, curls sticking out beneath it. He had a sword too, curved at the tip, and at least two other guns from what she could tell.

She already knew who they were from her dreams, but it unnerved her to meet them. Especially seeing as if you removed the weapons, they seemed like any two people you’d bump into on the street.

“You’re Nicky?”

He nodded before gesturing to the man at his side. “I am, and this is Joe, though I’m sure you already know that. We came to clean up and we were hoping to also see you here, though we couldn’t be guaranteed. When we last dreamed about you, you were in one of the safehouses they turned to, the one we don’t know about, but there was a ticket that showed you were headed in this direction.” 

_Clean up_.

Nile stared at the blood on the ground, then shot Nicky a distasteful look, hoping that he understood how much she disagreed with his actions. Given his huff of laughter, she doubted he was taking it too seriously.

“Do you know what he would have done with us? With Andy and Booker? With _you_?” Nicky challenged. “He would have locked us up like rats in a cage. He would have spent years trying to extract something that makes us useful to the world, even though it was never his to give. He chose his side,” he said, as Joe began pulling down all evidence of them on the boards. “He paid for it.”

“You’re not judge, jury, and executioner. We don’t get to be just because we have this gift,” Nile accused, hoping that Andy and Booker were on their way in. 

“We are when they come after us,” Joe said icily. “And Copley did. He sent a team after us with gas, grenades, and guns. That’s not a mistake we suffer twice.”

Whoever these men had been before they were caught, those remnants were gone. If they were still there, they were buried deeply and Nile suspected that she wouldn’t be the one to draw it out. 

Her job was to stall and give Andy and Booker a chance to swoop in. 

“What is this, then?”

“It is a choice,” Nicky said. “Andy would have you believe we are monsters in the dark, that we are something to be feared, but she is wrong. We tried to do good for the world, and instead, it made us suffer. It took the things we love the most and it hurt us. Now, we protect each other. We defend ourselves. That is the choice we give to you. Stay with Andy and Booker, fight for a people that think of us as lab experiments. Or, join me and Joe. You will take jobs that give you money for your pockets, you will stay alive, and you will be protected.”

Nile snorted derisively. “You don’t know me at all,” she accused.

“No, but we would like to,” Joe said, finished with pulling down all the photos and documents that mentioned Joe or Nicky. “Think about it.”

“No thanks,” Nile said flatly. She didn’t need any time. If she was going to be immortal, then she wanted to do good. That had to be the why behind it. Standing here inside Copley’s house, staring at the blood on the carpet was a stark reminder that while these men _said_ they tried to do good, they had crossed lines and didn’t even know they had.

It was an easy choice when Nile stared at it. So long as they lived like this, she’d never go with them.

“Are you going to kill me now?”

“Why?” Joe scoffed, letting his eyes roam over her. “That’s a nice shirt,” he appraised with a nod. “I wouldn’t want to ruin it.” 

“Wait for Andy,” Nile pleaded. “Booker is here too. I know they’d want to see you.”

“We’ve heard their pitch,” Nicky said, digging out a packet of matches. “If I were you, I’d get out of here. We don’t like to leave any evidence these days.” He struck the match and let it drop near several of the bulletin boards. He didn’t even wait to see if it would take. 

The match lit, he and Joe vanished from sight.

Nile’s eyes widened in horror at all that evidence (carefully compiled) going up in flames. “No!” she yelled, searching around frantically as she pulled down the curtains to try and tamp out the photos. The newspaper and other materials were so old that they were like kindling, and in the short time that she was searching for something to put it out, the flames were already up to the ceiling.

Coughing, Nile eyed the fire, the pictures, and asked herself whether she wanted to learn what it was like to be burnt alive. 

The answer was _fuck no_ , which meant that Nile grabbed whatever remaining folders were on the desk and bolted down the stairs, making it to fresh air. She bent over, heaving for fresh oxygen, but however her new talent worked, it managed to heal the smoke damage within minutes. 

Nile didn’t even have time to send up the signal before Andy and Booker arrived, the car’s brakes squealing as Andy brought it to a severe stop.

Copley’s house was already up in flames and Nicky and Joe were long gone. Nile was sitting in shock outside the house on a large stone, staring at the damage and wondering if she could ever be like them. If she were captured and caught, would they have destroyed her, piece by piece, until her soul was corrupted and sick?

“Nile!” Booker shouted with alarm, Andy rushing to join her side. “Did you…?”

“Nicky and Joe were here,” she informed them, feeling numb. “They killed Copley. They burned it down. All this, to protect themselves. What kind of men are they to choose who gets to live or die? Copley had boards devoted to you, all of you, and the _good_ that you’ve done! He just wanted to do the right thing.” 

He went about it in the wrong way, but he cared about what they’d done with their gift. They never even had a chance to ask Copley what he wanted with them. 

He died for his curiosity, because Nicky and Joe decided he should.

“Before the war, Nicky sounded a lot like you,” Andy said quietly. “And Joe, he was the most passionate and caring soul you’d ever find. I can’t tell you how many times the two of them forced me and Booker to get our heads out of our asses and do the right thing. The good thing.” Nile stared up at her and tried to understand, _scared_ because if they were like her, then she could become like them. 

“What happened?” she demanded.

“We told you,” Booker said quietly. “That love, that innate need to do good and right, it bit them in the ass. They were taken and suffered. For years, they suffered, and the best parts of them became their biggest weakness. It’s what broke a part of them. Imagine, being caged for decades and then you get to escape. Would you ever chance being captured again and being put through that torture?”

“But I saw it,” Nile pleaded. “I saw what they’ve done, before all this, I saw the kind of men they were.”

“Were,” Andy said sharply. “That’s exactly it. The men they _were_. Whoever they are now, I don’t recognize them.” 

“You _said_ that they’re still in there!” Nile accused, coughing some of the last bits of smoke debris out.

Andy’s brow was furrowed in consternation. “I said I hoped,” she countered, voice heavy with grief. “I need proof and that,” she said, gesturing to the house on fire, “is not the kind of evidence that tells me that they’re willing to work with a team again.” She rubbed her palms over her face angrily, hair wildly out of place in their wake. “Come on,” she said roughly. “Let’s get out of here before someone notices the countryside is about to burn down and finds us.” 

Nile glanced over her shoulder to the smoldering ruins of the house, wondering what she could have done differently. 

The trouble was, all that Nile saw when she closed her eyes was the blood on the floor and the good on the boards. She was struggling to reconcile the two and had a feeling she wouldn’t figure it out for a while.

Getting past that was going to be pretty damn difficult, she knew, and just like Andy said -- there was no evidence that she should even _try_.

* * *

> _New discoveries in the literary world have been unearthed in the north of France. The poetry appears to date back to the first World War, with a soldier lamenting the Sisyphean task of losing the ones he loves constantly, his hope eroding while his love strengthens. It is both bleak and yet bears a gothic echo of romance with its dark promises to protect his lover through harm and death, no matter the cost._

The one benefit to Nile’s encounter with Joe and Nicky in London meant that she’d stopped dreaming about them. Now, her nightly dreams were only haunted by Quynh in the iron coffin, though Nile felt that the rage was turning to determination. She could see Quynh. That meant Quynh could also see her.

She didn’t wake up screaming anymore, already inured to the pain of Quynh’s heartbreaking situation. Rubbing her eyes, she wandered towards the main room as she pulled her hoodie on, seeing Booker on the computer. 

“What are you looking for?”

Booker glanced up in the middle of spiking his coffee, gesturing to the screen. “Andy has me following Joe and Nicky’s digital trail. We’re hoping that we can intervene and get them.”

“And what?” Nile asked dubiously, still smelling smoke on some of her clothes and not entirely inclined to like Joe and Nicky very much right now. “Lock them up?”

They had to know what a bad idea that was.

“Appeal to who they used to be,” Booker said. “I know they’re in there. I know Joe and Nicky, they’re not lost. They can care about others. They still do, but every time something goes wrong, they spook. They need to understand that just because we failed them once doesn’t mean we’ll do it again. We’re their family. We’re a team.” 

He sounded so damn passionate and for a moment, Nile thought of her own team. Only, they’d let her down. Would she be willing to trust them again so readily?

“You care about them, a lot,” Nile observed.

“Until they were captured, I resented them,” Booker confessed quietly. “For half a century, I watched their happiness and felt envy. They loved each other and they always had one another. I lost my last son when he was forty-two, of cancer. I thought that I had nothing and they had everything.”

Nile watched him cautiously, not wanting to cut him off, despite his trailing off into silence. Whatever he was going to say, he’d been distracted by something on the computer screen. From her vantage point, she could see an old photo of Booker, Joe, and Nicky as the backdrop (with Andy slightly out of frame, giving the middle finger). 

“What happened to change that?” she prodded.

“They got taken,” Booker said, like it was as simple as that. “Suddenly, the thing that I resented them for became the weapon that people used against them. If I were taken, I would have been tortured, but my wife was already gone. My sons, the same. There was no one that they could have hurt to hurt me like that. It wasn’t the case for them. The thing that I hated most about what they had was being used against them.”

He switched to a new browser screen, navigating to a new set of pages (which looked like bank accounts). 

“After that, I stopped looking at my immortality the same way. It still hurts, knowing that I’ve lost my family, but I know that it could have been worse. So now I help Andy, try and get them back to make up for letting them get taken in the first place and…”

He trailed off, eyes widening slightly.

“And?”

“ _Merde_ ,” he exhaled, eyes wide. 

She had a feeling that wasn’t him being upset about the past. “You found something,” she guessed.

Booker nodded, head lifting to call for Andy. “Boss! You’re gonna want to see this.”

“Better be good, Booker.”

“It is,” he vowed.

Nile shifted to make room for Andy, looking at Booker’s screen to see a set of financials displayed on the screen. She had a sneaking suspicion what he was doing right now wasn’t legal, but she had a feeling that hacking into someone’s bank accounts was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to what Booker could do. “Wait,” she said, pointing to the name on the account. “Is this the Italian mafia’s financials?”

“Joe and Nicky run jobs for them sometimes,” Andy murmured, like that wasn’t a big deal. “Why are you showing me this?”

“Because look at the newest payment,” Booker said. “Three weeks ago, a transfer to one of Nicky’s offshore accounts for a hit. Now, look at today. There’s a transaction for double that amount, and look at the description.” Nile frowned as she looked at the screen and the vague description for ‘services rendered’. 

The bigger clue was that while there was an intention to pay Nicky for a job, the money had bounced back into the account - never taken. The job wasn’t completed, and now there was a payment for two hits to someone who _wasn’t_ Nicky or Joe. 

Andy figured it out quickly. “They’re paying someone else to off Nicky and Joe.”

“Why?” Nile asked, because if they had been paying Nicky to do their dirty work, she couldn’t imagine what would cause such a sudden turnaround, unless Nicky had done something to really piss off the mob.

Booker’s fingers were typing frantically and he let out a low sound of dismay as he brought up an article from only a few days ago, accompanied by some truly awful photos. Nile closed her eyes tightly, but the sight of those poor kids’ bodies was already burned against her eyelids. 

“They’re just kids,” Andy hissed angrily. “Nicky wouldn’t. Even now, he wouldn’t.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Booker agreed. “There’s no corresponding payment in either of their accounts. They could have other ones that we don’t know about, but I don’t think so. I think this is proof, boss.”

“Proof?” Nile echoed.

“They had to have known this would put a target on their back,” Andy said, still staring at the screen. “They knew turning down these powerful people would get them in trouble. It would put them in harm’s way. It might even get them captured.”

They’d known, and they had still turned down the job. They’d turned it down, then still had come to try and recruit Nile, even if it meant putting themselves out in the open.

“They said no because it was kids. They won’t touch kids.” Andy turned to Booker, squeezing both his shoulders. “Good job, asshole, I knew you’d find something that we could use one day. This is a good sign.”

Nile stared at Andy, not wanting to point out that Joe and Nicky having one line they wouldn’t cross didn’t mean much when civilians still died, people still paid the price, just not today and not these kids. “Andy…” Nile pleaded.

“No, it’s a good sign,” Andy insisted. “Nicky is still there, there’s a piece of Joe still there.” 

Nile thought back to the burning building. She thought about Copley’s blood on the ground. Closing her eyes, she forced herself to think about the images on the boards of Nicky and Joe in past times, helping children, saving lives, doing _good_. They’d once been the heart of the team, Andy had said. They were the moral compass until it broke.

She might not know anything about repairing one of those, but Nile felt fairly steady with her own. If rescuing Joe and Nicky and giving them back a team they could trust was the best she could do to try and help and guide them back to the straight and narrow path, then that was what she would do.

“Send them a message,” Andy encouraged. “Tell them we know what they did and that they need backup.”

“Sure,” Booker agreed, even if he didn’t sound very hopeful. “And when they don’t respond?”

“Then we go find them and prove that this time, we’re there for them.”


	3. break the cycle

> _People are still talking about the mysterious events of last night, when two men leapt from the roof of a ten-story building and seemed to survive. Blood was found on the scene, but the bodies are still missing. The incident may be connected to mob activity earlier this year, but sources have yet to confirm any links._

Three days had passed without a message back to them. Nile felt like they were either deliberately ignoring it or they were too busy to have noticed it. If the mob really was after them, she figured it might be more of the latter than the former. They kept scanning the news, with small tidbits of news filtering out every so often, keeping an eye out for them.

It sounded like whoever was after them was determined, but seeing as one of the conditions for being paid was proof of death, this was only going to end badly.

Either they’d have to fake it and be corpses for a lot longer than they wanted, or someone was going to figure out that Joe and Nicky couldn’t die. Then, who knew what kind of lab would be after them? 

Booker brought a tablet to the breakfast table, an article already loaded. “Two men jumped from a roof, died, and then vanished,” he shared. 

“Joe and Nicky?” Andy mumbled past her cereal.

“That, or we’ve definitely been missing out on new immortals. The hit had the mafia’s hands all over it,” Booker confirmed. “Someone’s going to notice that they’re supposed to be dead very soon and that can only go badly.” He typed rapidly, giving Nile and Andy a proud smile. “Luckily for us, I know exactly where it is that hit went down. London, near Waterloo Station. They’re still here.”

“Good,” Andy said, as she shoveled cereal into her mouth. “Send another message. Tell them that we took the job and we’re delivering them to the mob.”

Nile’s eyes widened in alarm. “What?” she demanded.

Booker didn’t even seem to question it, which made Nile instantly angry at him, too. 

“Andy!” Nile shouted. “Andy, you can’t _do_ that!” Booker kept typing, which meant Nile reached back to try and pry his hands off the keys. “Stop that, they’re your friends, you’re trying to get them back!”

“Exactly,” Booker agreed. “We just need them to stay put and listen. There’s three of us and two of them. We need them still long enough to talk some sense into them. What better way than pretending that we’re there to kill them? We’re not going to get them in one place otherwise.”

He had an annoying point in that logic. Andy did too, seeing as it was her plan.

“I still don’t like this,” Nile grumbled. 

“We didn’t expect you to,” Booker said. “You’re new.”

“If getting used to threatening murder is what happens when you get old, then I’m glad I’m new.”

She was getting really annoyed with how her most sarcastic and caustic words did nothing with either Andy or Booker. She knew she could walk away, but she’d made her decision.

She was in.

Nile accepted a holster from Andy and a set of pistols. She didn’t want to say it out loud, but meeting Joe and Nicky had unnerved her, even if it hadn’t been for very long at all. She was glad for the weapons this time, even if she was (probably) not going to die permanently at their hands.

“Come on,” Andy encouraged. “Let’s go see the crime scene they left. I left my phone GPS on, so they should be able to track us.”

“Why would they have your phone number?”

“Because I still haven’t changed it.”

Nile gaped at Andy, beginning to understand just how much she’d been hoping to give Joe and Nicky every chance to come back to them. For Andy’s sake, she hoped this time worked out, even if she didn’t have a great feeling about it. She took her usual seat in the back (which was becoming _her_ spot), not sure how she felt about any of this. 

Really, she would have been happy if someone could just tell her a plan that went beyond ‘we’re going to get them in one place and talk’. “How do you know they’ll show up?” Nile asked, hoping to use it as a prelude to ask for more. 

“They might not,” Booker pointed out. 

“You really think they want to be looking over their shoulders for us, if they think we took the job?” Andy shook her head, watching as the streetlights passed on their way into the city. “No, they’ll come for us. It’s just a matter of what happens when we’re all in the same place.”

Nile crossed her arms over her chest, throwing Andy a displeased look in the mirror.

“Stop sulking,” Andy ordered. “I know you want to help them as much as we want them back. Your poker face needs work.”

Nile frowned, trying to rearrange her features like she could somehow command herself not to give her emotions away so easily, but decided that she wanted Andy to know how much she disapproved of the choices she was making. It was one thing to go after Joe and Nicky, it was another to pretend like they were going to kill them.

“Here,” Andy gestured. “Park here and we’ll walk the rest of the way.”

It was long past closing times at the nearby pubs. The streets were mostly empty and there was an eeriness to how quiet London was, nearing four in the morning. Climbing out of the car, Nile took up their six and covered them, even though the only people they encountered were stray clubbers stumbling around looking for taxis to bring them home. 

Even though she kept an eye out for clever disguises, none of them were Joe and Nicky.

She was so focused on identifying strangers on the street that she bumped right into Booker when he stopped walking. 

“This is where the news reported the bodies,” Booker said, peering down a long alleyway, then up to the balconies above them to check for any snipers (or, in this case, any Nicky’s). The alley was dingy and dark. It was the kind of place without witnesses. Nile stayed at the mouth of the alley as Andy and Booker wandered deeper into it. While they did, Nile kept an eye out for any wandering passer-bys.

“You think they won’t come after us?” Andy asked, once they reached the dead end of the alley without finding any sign of the men.

Booker shook his head, shrugging. “I stopped understanding them a long time ago.” He gave one of the bins a kick with his heel, cursing in frustration.

In response, a single bullet fired from within the dumpster, piercing the metal and Booker’s calf.

_Great_ , thought Nile, gun up. They came.

“Fuck!” he yelped. “Andy!” he roared. 

“Nile!” Andy shouted, as Nile quickly advanced into the alley.

Interesting choice, hiding in the dumpster, but Nile had to give credit where it was due. It was unexpected. She reached out to check Booker’s wound, but he waved her away. By the time she was inside the alley, it had already healed. She watched carefully, splitting her attention between Joe hopping out of the dumpster and Nicky descending with his rifle from the fire escapes above. 

Nicky was loading the gun, Joe was drawing the scimitar, and Nile was feeling really fucking out of her depth. Stuck in the shock of Joe hiding in a dumpster and taking Booker out, she was on her heels and too late to intervene as Joe attacked Andy, leaving Booker to Nicky. 

Andy chose labrys over gun, and Nile watched in horrified awe as she instantly became a vicious machine with it. Within one pivoted turn, she brought the labrys down through flesh, muscle, and bone, cutting off Joe’s hands. She’d never seen gore like that before, and without meaning to, she flinched. Her gaze sharply drew to Nicky instead, keeping her gun fixed on the middle of Nicky’s forehead, with a look on her face that warned him not to pull anything. 

“Don’t,” she warned, when it looked like Nicky would go for his gun.

“Nicolò,” Joe hissed. “Do it.” 

Nile couldn’t stop herself from glancing to Joe’s hands, which were _regrowing_ as she watched. It answered a question that she didn’t even know she had about their immortality while simultaneously unnerving her in the worst way. 

“Nicky! Listen to me!” Andy snapped, likely saving Nile from a bullet to the brain. “You are going to die! Joe is going to die! You can’t run from them forever. You’ve already died once. What’s going to happen the next time they come after you?”

“We will survive and kill them.”

“And then what?” Andy was belligerently determined and Nile thought that she wouldn’t stop unless she was put down. Nile just had to make sure that didn’t happen. She shifted her grip on her gun to cover Andy. “They’ll know what you are. These people are powerful. You think they won’t grab you and Joe, shove you in a cage and try and figure out a way to monetize you?” she challenged, approaching and pressing the barrel of her gun against Nicky’s shoulder to give him a prodding poke. “Think about this. You are on their kill list. Either you die and disappear, which is harder when they know who you are. Or you come back to us.”

“We were with you when we got taken,” Joe spat at her, stepping in to barricade Nicky from Andy’s gun. “We were with you in 1917. You lost Quynh. You lost us. I had to watch the man I love be tortured for over thirty years. I watched them bleed him out, I watched him starve to death,” he said, his eyes filled with pain. “Every last breath he took, I made a vow that I would kill the people responsible and protect him so it never happened again. That’s what I did. That’s what we did. We protect ourselves because you couldn’t. We’ll find Quynh, because you haven’t.”

“And neither have you!” Booker growled at them, still limping slightly like a phantom pain from his calf was still afflicting him, staggering back towards the fray. “Don’t be assholes, we’re trying to help.”

“How?” Joe yelled back at him.

“Because they fucked up and they’re not saying it!” Nile shouted to get above the racket, feeling like they weren’t going to get anywhere. “You want to know what’s different this time. Me,” she insisted. She didn’t know where she was going with this, but it felt better than letting the four of them talk in circles. “I’m new to this. I need people to protect me too, but I am not going to let anything happen to you. I’m not taking your deal, though. You have to take mine.”

Joe and Nicky exchanged a silent look, their brows furrowed as they spent a silent moment asking themselves what they wanted to do. 

“What deal are you offering?” Joe finally asked.

Nile searched her heart, because she didn’t have a plan going into this. She’d been following Andy’s lead, but maybe that was the problem. Maybe Joe and Nicky were never going to rejoin them while it was only Andy and Booker, but Nile meant what she’d said. She would do everything in her power to keep them protected.

“You do the right thing. You do the _good_ thing. I saw Copley’s boards. I saw what you’re capable of.” Her gaze turned sharp, her words icy. “You killed that man to protect yourselves. That needs to stop. _We_ will protect you, but by doing things properly. We will do things where no one gets caught and people don’t have to die, because I can only carry so much and I think maybe you’re both the same.”

Nile breathed in, feeling like she was on the right path because she was still talking and she was still breathing.

“We’ll all look out for each other. We don’t have to be best friends or family, but we’ll be teammates. We’ll have each other’s back. That’s my deal,” she said, knowing that it was short and probably had a lot of gaps in it, but the core ask was there.

They needed to go back to being the men on that board and not vigilante mercenaries only concerned about their own skin.

“What do you say?”

She saw the way Nicky raised his rifle to take the aim off Andy. It wasn’t an immediate ceasefire, seeing as Nile suspected that he was well-trained enough that this could become a bloodbath with ease. What happened next gave her more hope that they were relenting, when Joe put his scimitar in its sheath. 

_Yes_ , she told herself. _Please_ , she mentally begged.

Only, they didn’t say anything. They barely even looked at her. Joe and Nicky only had eyes for one another, and instead of accepting Nile’s deal, they passed them by without a single word spoken, leaving them in the alley alone.

[ ](https://ibb.co/MBd2xFp)

No deal, it looked like.

She felt her shoulders slump in defeat, not knowing why she’d been so hopeful that she would’ve been the one to break through to them after Andy and Booker kept failing for years, but she had. She had really hoped that she could do it.

“We tried,” Andy offered, watching them go. 

“Now what?” Nile asked.

There was an awkward stretch of silence, but finally, Andy spoke.

“I’m going to go make sure the price gets taken off their head. You two go back to the safe house and wait.”

That didn’t make sense to her. “Wait?”

“They might just come around.”

It felt an awful lot like Andy was humoring Nile, but the sad thing was that she actually thought she needed it. She appreciated it all the more when Booker wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her into a half-hearted hug. 

“You tried,” he said.

Not hard enough, was the only takeaway that Nile felt out of this.

* * *

> _The Genoa orphanage would like to thank its anonymous donors for the large sum received this week. If anyone would like to claim this incredible show of generosity, we would be excited to name one of the wings after you, as we do with all our large benefactors._

It was nearly a week later and Joe and Nicky still hadn’t come around.

Even Nile, who kept insisting they wait another day before giving up on them, was beginning to lose hope that they were going to show up and take her up on her offer. Still, at least she’d tried. 

That meant nothing for her mood. She couldn’t stop herself from feeling so dejected. It felt like her very first mission with her new team was a failure because of her, even though logically Nile knew it was a long shot and that they’d been failing plenty before she even showed up.

“Hey,” Booker greeted her, sitting down beside her on the couch. “Drink,” he offered her his flask.

She was in exactly the kind of low mood that the flask was desperately welcome. “I thought it would work,” she admitted. “I don’t know why I was so naive. I don’t know them. They don’t know me.” She felt her shoulders sagging, shaking her head. “I guess I just thought I could do some good.”

“You’re going to do plenty of it,” Booker assured. “With us,” he vowed.

Nile leaned over to bump her shoulder against his, opening her mouth to ask what they were going to do next when there was a knock at the door -- an _unexpected_ knock. Andy popped her head out from one of the bedrooms, shooting both Nile and Booker a curious look to ask if they were expecting anyone.

Nile shook her head, because it wasn’t like ordering delivery to their safehouse was on her list of ways to get her new team pissed at her. Booker answered by drawing his gun, keeping it on the door as he advanced to provide cover.

Nile wasn’t sure what she was expecting -- maybe enemies or someone coming to hunt them down. Maybe it was the US military, who’d found Nile and intended to force her back to Germany.

Booker opened the door to Joe and Nicky standing in the hallway with what looked like luggage was _not_ it. Sighing with relief, Nile sank back against the couch, closing her eyes and sending up a prayer of thanks that she wasn’t about to get pried away from her new team.

“We considered your offer,” Joe said calmly. “We’re willing to give you a trial run.”

“Are you armed?” Booker asked.

“Hello to you too,” Nicky replied.

“Are you armed?” Booker repeated. “You’ve killed me more times than I can count, now suddenly you say you want to take the deal. I’d like to know if you’re planning to cut my head off in the middle of the night.”

“Only if you still snore the way you used to,” Joe quipped.

Nile felt a strange unease about the fact that they were joking so readily and quickly when they had been at odds only days before. She had the feeling that their familial relationship was deeper and more complicated than anything she’d experienced in her twenty-six years alive.

Then again, she didn’t seem to be the only one uneasy about this.

Andy had her arms crossed over her chest and while she welcomed them in and locked the door behind them, she still didn’t look like she was ready to bring them in for a tight embrace. Booker looked just as wary, but it was Andy they looked to, to set the pace.

“If you’re back, we’re setting ground rules,” Andy said calmly.

Joe and Nicky didn’t seem pleased given the way their reaction. Both of them were suddenly standing too tall, too straight, and Nicky was sneering like he had something to say about it. Still, seeing as they didn’t storm out, Nile could tell that they wanted to be here. She saw the way Joe squeezed Nicky’s hand, maybe a quiet encouragement to hear it out. It worked. The tension melted and Nicky gave Andy an encouraging nod to continue.

“You don’t have to take every job with us,” Andy began with the first rule, “but you tell us _before_ the job if you intend to sit it out. If something feels wrong or you feel like it’s dicey and you don’t want in, you can refuse. You walk off in the middle of a job and leave us hanging, you’re out.”

“Understood,” Joe said. “Next?”

“You kill any of us, at any point in time,” Andy went on, coolly, “and you’re gone. No shooting Booker to get past him, no snapping my neck because I gave you an order you don’t agree with, and you keep your hands _off_ Nile.”

Nicky looked appalled that they would even suggest such a thing. “We wanted her to come with us,” he said. “We wouldn’t hurt her.”

“You’re hurting my feelings now,” Booker scoffed. “What am I supposed to think about the bullets you put through my forehead back in India.”

“You were guarding Joe’s escape route and if you delayed him, he could have been taken.”

Nicky said it so calmly that it seemed like the only possible scenario, even though Nile understood that by killing Booker, it had put him in danger. Well, somewhat. From what she’d heard, if you were in a dicey situation, you played dead until you had a chance to escape or your hand was forced. 

Andy didn’t look half as amused, settling on the couch so she could continue with her list of demands.

“You don’t kill _any of us_ ,” she repeated. “Say you understand, Nicky.”

“ _Si_ ,” Nicky drawled, “ _Capisco_.” 

“How many more rules have you got, boss?” Joe asked. It sounded strange to Nile’s ears that he was falling back in line so easily, calling her boss again. Then again, maybe a few decades off the moral path wasn’t so damning when, combined, you had a grand total of nearly ten thousand years of history. 

Andy’s eyes sharpened as she fixed her gaze on the two of them. “Only one more crucial rule.”

“Tell us,” Nicky said. 

They hadn’t hit a dealbreaker yet. Nile fervently hoped that they weren’t about to with the last rule. 

Andy leaned forward, her forearms on her thighs as she fixed a steely gaze on Joe, then Nicky, before she shared the third rule. “You give us _everything_ you have on your search for Quynh.”

The tension in the room broke instantly. Nile could tell that not only was that a condition that both men could easily accept, it was something that they were happy to do.

“We’ll take you out to our boat tomorrow. There’s been a promising spot we’ve been mapping,” Nicky said, glancing to Joe, then back to Andy. “We accept the terms of your truce. It will not be the same as it was a century ago,” he warned, almost portentously, “but we will try and give you a reason to trust us.”

“We’ll try our best to not fail you,” Andy said gravely. “Booker and I, we’re sorry. We’re sorry that we fucked up. We should have kept looking. We should have tried harder. We’re just…”

“Sorry,” Booker ended the thought, when Andy couldn’t seem to.

Nile had yet to die from a lack of air, but the way she was holding her breath, she felt like it might happen. She didn’t even know how she felt about this. It should be weird, shouldn’t it? These two men were killers, mercenaries, and men who had killed people and set fire to buildings. 

Yet, the pictures on that board still lurked in her memory.

The ghosts of those men still lived on in these ones, she was sure.

“So, army of five? Or do we start a band?” Nile joked, starting to see her new life coalesce before her. 

Andy gave her a rueful smile. “Dibs on drums.” On her way past her to grab a bottle of booze, she squeezed Nile’s shoulder, whispering, “Good job,” at a volume that only Nile could hear. 

It felt weak and a little like she shouldn’t be seeking out Andy’s admiration, but she also couldn’t deny how damn _good_ it felt to have done something right. Joe and Nicky weren’t going to be automatically trusted and she was pretty sure they shouldn’t be, but she felt good about bringing them back into the fold.

They were team and more than that, they were once family.

No man left behind.

_Especially_ not on this team.

* * *

> _The British Museum is proud to display the works of famed oceanographer Dr. O’Leary who has been working to unearth treasures from the 16th century from the English Channel. His works are on display in the temporary exhibition hall and a ticket can be purchased through the end of the year._

Two years later, Nile had traded in rapidly shifting safehouses for a ridiculously nice yacht. She just had to ignore how Nicky and Joe had purchased it, reminding herself that the majority of their jobs were terrible people who deserved the bullet that Joe and Nicky put in them.

The one thing that she’d learned was that mercenaries definitely had better bank accounts than what Andy and Booker did, given that Joe and Nicky’s lifestyle was leagues nicer than what she’d first been introduced to when she’d joined the team. 

It was a grey area that she was learning to cope with, trying not to think about the money that was used to pay for their current lodgings -- which happened to be a yacht with enough bedrooms that they all had their privacy.

“Coffee?” Booker offered, handing Nile a mug. 

She’d only woken up because the yacht had finally dropped anchor after they’d reached their destination. Cinching her robe tighter, she rubbed her eyes, peering at the deck to see Andy suiting up in the scuba suit for a dive, Joe and Nicky helping with the equipment. “Please,” she mumbled, grabbing the mug as she tugged the flannel robe a little tighter shut over her pajamas. They’d been off the English coast for a while now, since the oceanographer that Joe and Nicky hired had given them new maps with modified current patterns, and they had two more weeks of this before they took on a new job.

It was the deal. 

Two months of the year, they were at sea. The rest, they did the kind of good that she hoped would keep Joe and Nicky reminded that they didn’t only have to protect themselves and that they could do some good for the world. Nile settled into the little kitchenette with her coffee, grabbing the notes for their next job so she could keep adding to her notes about the plan. 

Andy had been good about giving Nile the kind of autonomy and freedom to really be a part of the team and influence their plans. It meant a lot to her, and it helped her to feel like she really had a place with them.

Not everyone got this lucky after being kidnapped. 

“Any luck?” Nile called over to Joe to ask, once nearly an hour had passed. She and Booker had run through her schematics, had made small talk about the weather, and argued about what was for dinner. 

Joe ignored them, which, _rude_. 

“Joe…”

“Andy’s coming back up!” Joe called over his shoulder, fixated on the line. His body was taut, a panic was in his eyes, and Nicky looked half-wild given the way he was cranking at Andy’s line. “Booker, come help!”

“Why?” Booker asked, frowning. “It’s just Andy, get Nicky to help you pull her up.”

Nicky was already hauling on the line, trying to drag it towards the winch as he cursed under his breath in Italian. He kept glancing at the monitor, and if Nile didn’t know better, she’d say that was _hope_ on his face.

“Because it’s not just Andy. She found something and it’s heavy as fuck,” Joe breathed out, leaning over the edge to follow Andy’s ascension. 

Andy surfaced, prying the scuba gear from her mouth, swimming to the side of the yacht. “I attached the hook. Pull it up,” she instructed, hauling herself onto the deck so she could drip onto the polished wood and watch over the side as Booker rushed over to help with the winch so they could get the object up.

Army of six, thought Nile, facing down the prospect of yet another immortal recovered from an awful fate.

It was a good thing they weren’t planning on making music. Six people was _terrible_ for a band and she’d hate to have to watch Booker and Joe fight about who’d be lead guitarist (again). Nile stayed back, heart pounding in her chest as she watched the iron maiden coming over the edge of the yacht.

It dented the deck, but no one gave a damn. They were all too busy staring at the torture device with a silence that felt weighted with grief, despair, anger, and a thread of hope running through it. 

“It’s her, isn’t it?” Nile asked quietly, tightening her grip on her mug as a bolt of relief flooded her. The nightmares would end. The endless watery grave wouldn’t haunt her sleep, not after today. She wanted to cry with relief, but she told herself there’d be time for that later.

The woman inside that torture device needed them now.

Luckily, Nile suspected that of all people, Joe and Nicky would make sure she adjusted to the world, and Andy wouldn’t let her go. She stayed back because there wasn’t a place for her in this, not yet. She’d welcome Quynh, she would try to be a source of support for her, but she was Andy’s and Joe’s and Nicky’s first.

Joe took a sledgehammer to the locks and threw the cover off, giving the woman inside room to gasp and sit up. For the first time in almost five centuries, she breathed in air, not water. For the first time in centuries, she didn’t die instantly again.

“Quynh,” Andy breathed out raggedly. 

She didn’t say it, but Nile had heard that tone before as she whispered to Quynh that she was safe, and she was here. It was the same tone she’d used with Joe and Nicky for weeks after they’d rejoined. 

It was apology and adulation. It was regret and remorse. 

It was, more than anything, _hope_ for a new beginning. 

“Andromache,” creaked a water wraith, reborn for the first time in years. 

It was everyone’s turn to prove to Quynh that they wouldn’t fail her again. They’d done it with Joe and Nicky, with great success. Now, it was time to do it once more. 

Nile had a pretty damn good feeling about this. With their team, what couldn’t they do?

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art for 'as the friendship goes, resentment grows'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28410135) by [Faal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faal/pseuds/Faal)




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